Reviews from a small country

Tag Archives: Wirral

A poet is a rare thing, especially when they carry a guitar, sing songs of beauty and despair, of anger and peace, in the same set and often in the same tune. A poet doesn’t have to found nervously thumbing their notes behind a curtain waiting for the time honoured introduction, or putting their demands down in a flourished way which is hidden by the obscure and sometimes cryptic.

Confidence is an amazing thing, it can tear down mountains, raise the seas, and give you something that doesn’t come naturally, it gives you the ability to understand just how far you can push yourself. To hear it being sung with such exuberance and in its demurest form is to know that the musician on stage doesn’t just want to succeed themselves, they want you to feel that you also can take on the world and at least play it at its own game and with a level playing field.

Poetry in Liverpool and its surrounding areas has had a huge mountain to climb in terms of ever trying to match what went before it after the Second World War and the arrival of the beat poetry that influenced a generation of poetry lovers in Merseyside and beyond. The names of Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough are forever entwined with that time and any promising composer of words has the knowledge that they have an almost near impossible task infront of them. There are a number of poets in Liverpool today who can fill any void left and amongst them is the Wirral’s Tim Kingham.

Merseyside undisputedly produces some great bands of every music genre that it is possible to list and yet somehow in amongst the maelstrom and cacophony of disparate tunes and compositions, heavy metal doesn’t get that much of a look in. Very few bands have touched upon the field of crashing and brutal guitars placed within the heart of a superb drum beat and told the tale in Liverpool. From out of the darkness come the Wirral’s Buckle Tongue and one of the new great bands to watch out for in 2013.